This invention relates to a meat grinding apparatus for grinding frozen meat into ground meat.
When meat is to be ground, a so-called meat grinder for automatically mincing it is commonly used. Although these types of grinders are convenient in cases where unfrozen meat is processed into ground meat, a problem arises in cases where a frozen mass of meat, i.e., frozen meat is processed into ground meat. For example, if frozen meat, as such, is put into the hopper of the grinder, it is fed to the mincing position, where it is minced. As a result, the frozen meat is minced forcibly or in abnormal condition, damaging the meat structure and imposing excessively high mechanical loads on the grinder in feeding and mincing frozen meat, threatening to damage the apparatus. To avoid this danger, it is necessary to crush the frozen meat by another apparatus before it is put into the hopper of the grinder. In this case, however, the frozen meat must be first charged into said another apparatus, where it is crushed, whereupon the crushed meat must be taken out of the crushing apparatus, and then it must be charged into the hopper of the grinder, thus giving rise to a disadvantage that the operation is troublesome and inefficient.
An object of this invention is to provide a frozen meat grinder, which eliminates the aforesaid conventional disadvantage and which is capable of crushing frozen meat charged into the hopper, and then smoothly and continuously feeding it to the mincing position, and mincing it.
Another object of this invention is to provide a meat grinding apparatus having a crusher roll for crushing frozen meat charged into the hopper and pushing the crushed meat into a pipe, and a main roll for feeding the crushed meat, which is pushed into the pipe, to the mincing position.
A further object of this invention is to provide a meat grinding apparatus designed so that the rotary shaft of the crusher roll for crushing frozen meat is rotated at a relatively low speed to avoid damage to the crusher roll, while the rotary shaft of the main roll for feeding meat to the mincing position is rotated at a relatively high speed to mince the crushed meat sharply at the mincing position.
Another object of this invention is to provide a meat grinding apparatus, wherein the outer diameter of the feed vanes of the crusher roll and the inner diameter of the bottom surface of the hopper are relatively large, while the outer diameter of the feed vane of the main roll and the inner diameter of the pipe are relatively small, and the meat feed rate of the crusher roll is equal to that of the main roll, the crushed meat being accurately and continuously fed to the mincing position by the feed vanes of the crusher roll and main roll.